The Hub

This guitar appears to have been assembled with urea formaldehyde glue, which is insoluble in water and doesn’t melt at any reasonable temperature. It is definitely not hide glue or resorcinol.The neck pocket is not under a fret slot. Luckily, very little glue was used to assemble the neck and it was all on the cheeks of the tenon and the neck came off rather easily using a combination of the StewMac heat rod and foam cutters, with smal…

I just pulled the neck off a Vega Arthur Godfrey Solo Lute baritone ukulele. It was pretty easy. First I heated and loosened the short fretboard extension. I already knew the neck was attached with a glued butt joint and small straight tenon. The picture show where I drilled three holes for foam cutter heaters. I only used the two on either side of the tenon, at the 16th fret (Note: neck joins body at 16th) and didn't need the hole at…

This thing had a conveniently placed hole in the neck pickup cavity that ran all the way to the end of the tenon, presumably the entry point for the long drill bit that drilled the access from pickup cavity to control cavity before the neck was originally fitted. I injected several pipettes of hot water into this hole while heating the fretboard extension area with a silicone blanket to loosen the extension from the body. Reactivated hi…

I have access to a nova thunderlaser 5-something and I saw a video of somebody cutting out a fret board as well as the fret slots, as well as an entire neck out of a blank with a laser cutter, and I’m wondering if this is a reasonable thing to do and if anybody has experience with the kind of shrinkage that would probably happen with such a deep cut in the neck blank. Any insight at all is greatly appreciated. Thank you!

I was able to get this one out using two Foam cutters and a little extra external heating of the heel with a heat gun on the low setting. Drilled at 15th fret as usual and got lucky, the holes intersected and scorched the dowels. I still had to wrestle it for about an hour... Converting to bolt-on is fun because the dowel holes will make aligning things easier. Once the dowels are removed, I'll just use two of the holes to refasten with…

This is a Suzuki violin company 'Three S' OM-style guitar, circa 1970s. This particular instrument was sold in the Japanese domestic market (my customer purchased it in Japan) but I've seen others in circulation here in Australia so presumably some were exported too. Sides and back are laminated rosewood, the top is solid spruce. Although this ended up being a relatively standard reset, I feel like this is worth documenting as prior to…